Today, we turn our focus to verification IP and I asked how much adoption is there for verification IP? How does the market size for this compare to design IP?

Neill Mullinger, Verification IP Product Marketing Manager, Synopsys

Based on what we’ve seen in the market and from our discussions with Synopsys VIP users, commercial verification IP (VIP) is currently roughly 50 to 60 percent of the overall market, but is growing. The remaining market is still being served by internally developed VIP. This adoption rate varies from protocol to protocol since commercial VIP adoption increases as the complexity of the protocol increases. The overall trend is towards use of commercial verification IP for the industry standard protocols since development and support of internal VIP takes resources from more critical value-added tasks.

Based on market data, even three years ago, the ratio was probably 60% of developers creating their own verification IP (VIP) and 40% of them buying the VIP. Today, that ratio has flipped, as the trend is towards purchasing VIP due to the higher complexity of new standards. This follows along with the integration focus—people that design blocks are more comfortable performing verification themselves and vice versa.

Also, each revision of every major specification is substantially more complex—that’s what’s driving chip designers to commercial VIP solutions. Right now, the VIP market is much smaller than the design IP market and, while there are big upside potentials to both, the growth on the design IP side is likely to be exponential.

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